{"id":1515,"date":"2013-03-21T11:50:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-21T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/re-visioning-gender-in-philosophy-of-religion-reason-love-and-epistemic-locatedness.html"},"modified":"2013-03-21T11:50:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-21T11:50:00","slug":"re-visioning-gender-in-philosophy-of-religion-reason-love-and-epistemic-locatedness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/re-visioning-gender-in-philosophy-of-religion-reason-love-and-epistemic-locatedness.html","title":{"rendered":"Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness<\/a>.<\/i>Ashgate, 2012.<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
Pamela Sue Anderson has just published her second full-length book on the feminist philosophy of religion and I would argue that it has been well worth the wait! The ruling metaphor of the book is taken directly from an essay by poet\/feminist Adrienne Rich (\u201cWhen We Dead Awaken,\u201d 1971) who wrote about the necessity of \u2018re-visioning\u2019 the past. Re-visioning indicates the vital life-giving work of looking back at the traditions of the past, \u2018seeing with new eyes,\u2019 entering from a new critical \u2013 in this case, feminist \u2013 direction. Only by confronting powerful past assumptions about women contained within their styles and stories can we hope to move on from the distortions all of us \u2013 men, women, the transgendering \u2013 have suffered on the account of sexist or misogynistic structures and systems.<\/span><\/div>\n
In this spirit of re-visioning Anderson provides us with a range of meticulously worked through examples. Feminists of course have been discussing the issues for a while \u2013 in 1998, the year in which Anderson\u2019s first essay into this area \u2013\u00a0A Feminist Philosophy of Religion<\/a>\u00a0phil<\/i>, Blackwells \u2013 was published, another feminist philosopher of religion, Grace Jantzen proposed her own solution \u2013\u00a0Becoming Divine<\/i>, Manchester University Press \u2013 to the problem of sexist or misogynistic structures in \u2018religion\u2019 by suggesting that what women needed was a parallel concept of the feminine divine, that could contest the violent, death-obsessed stories of masculine divinity in the Christian west. Now as then Anderson resists this path on the grounds that divinity is not a free-floating concept, but one already caught up in a web or gendered interpretation. Yet for those who think the issue is \u2018over and done with\u2019 Anderson\u2019s book shows clearly that she thinks a kind of scepticism and complacency about gender still very much exists, not the least in discussions that take place under the heading of the academic study of the philosophy of religion. It is a kind of scepticism or complacency made apparent, for example, in the words of a theologian like, T J Mawson, who claims that \u2018\u201cno sensible theist has ever thought that God really does have a gender\u201d\u2019 or in the view that provided one is \u2018clear-headed\u2019, patriarchal bias can be avoided (Anderson, 2012, 176). As Anderson patiently but quite relentlessly, persists \u201cthe point is to question whether \u2018clear-headed\u2019 thinking can avoid any gender-bias in the traditional philosophical arguments for Christian theism, especially when such terms as person, action and love, along with adjectives like personal, incorporeal, loving and the pronouns he, his and him are all applied to God\u2019 (Anderson, 2012, 176).\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
There are also many references in this book to the work of French philosopher, Mich\u00e8le Le Doeuff and to her idea \u2013 the \u2018philosophical imaginary\u2019 \u2013 that whilst gender bias and sexism are not very often on display in plain sight in our civilised western society, they invariably inform the spaces behind or inbetween, where we find \u2018stories about men and women, myths about divine and human, imagery and asides about male omniscience and female humility\u2019 (205-206). In other words, the fact that someone like Mawson can afford to ignore his own \u2018epistemic locatedness\u2019 has as much to do with the philosophical imaginary that is sustaining his unacknowledged privilege as a male academic theologian \u2013 the assumption of male neutrality \u2013 as it has to do with any genuinely universal validity to his argument, philosophically interrogated.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness.Ashgate, 2012. Pamela Sue Anderson has just published her second full-length book on the feminist philosophy of religion and I would argue that it has been well worth the wait! The ruling metaphor of the book is taken directly from an essay by poet\/feminist Adrienne […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nRe-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness.Ashgate, 2012.Pamela Sue Anderson has just published her second\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/re-visioning-gender-in-philosophy-of-religion-reason-love-and-epistemic-locatedness.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness.Ashgate, 2012.Pamela Sue Anderson has just published her second\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/re-visioning-gender-in-philosophy-of-religion-reason-love-and-epistemic-locatedness.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rhetoric Race and Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-03-21T11:50:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andre E. 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